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Empowering real-time insights for improved decision-making and problem resolution

Bridget E Engle, chief information officer and head of engineering, BNY Mellon, recently spoke to Dataquest and shared her views

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Supriya Rai
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In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, real-time insights play a critical role in driving improved decision-making and problem resolution. Organizations are increasingly leveraging advanced technologies and data analytics to gain valuable insights that can inform strategic choices and enable proactive issue resolution. By harnessing the power of real-time insights, businesses can respond swiftly to changing market conditions, identify potential risks, and capitalize on emerging opportunities. Bridget E Engle, chief information officer and head of engineering, BNY Mellon, recently spoke to Dataquest and expressed how access to up-to-the-minute data and analytics empowers decision-makers to make informed choices.

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DQ: Can you explain how the Cyber, Technology & Operations Center (CTOC) provides real-time insights to improve decision-making and problem resolution? 

Bridget E Engle: The CTOC is a best-in-class incident monitoring and response center that delivers next-level resiliency through cohesive, client-centric incident response and management. It serves as the command center of BNY Mellon, providing an end-to-end view of business and market activity to deliver real-time insights that can help improve decision-making and reduce the time to identify and resolve problems. We use advanced analytics and machine learning to process trillions of telemetries to present actionable insights to our operators in the CTOC.

DQ: How did BNY Mellon drive standardization of monitoring tools and strategy across the Bank? Can you share some examples of the benefits achieved through this effort? 

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Bridget E Engle: Standardization of monitoring in tools and strategy underpins our processes, analytics and visualizations. To achieve holistic coverage, we’ve rolled out a series of control points where every application, from the menu application for our cafeteria to our flagship custody application, gets the same controls and tools applied before production. This “democratization of data” enables all operators and systems to speak the same language, which allows us to quickly resolve complex cross-application incidents and laid the foundation for a broad roll-out of machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation across the enterprise.

DQ: How can organizations apply an engineering-first approach and leverage AI in monitoring? How does this benefit clients?

Bridget E Engle: Historically, there has been a challenge to process and leverage high volumes of data into useful insights. AI allows us to analyze a significant amount of information more efficiently and takes the heavy lifting off our operators. This enables us to handle increased volume at the same resource capacity without degrading our service availability. Our clients depend on us to process millions of transactions per day and by leveraging AI we are able to provide faster and more proactive support to them.

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DQ: Can you describe a specific instance where the CTOC provided real-time insights that helped improve decision-making and problem-resolution? 

Bridget E Engle: In every incident, the CTOC has provided real-time insights that has helped improve our decision-making capabilities. The CTOC is more than a physical room. It’s a collection of services and technologies that our operators use to ensure our systems are running flawlessly.

DQ: How has the implementation of an engineering-first approach and AI in monitoring helped reduce manual overhead for your team? Can you describe the tangible benefits that clients have seen as a result of your organization's monitoring efforts

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Bridget E Engle: Our clients have experienced increased stability and resiliency due to our AI capabilities. AI has directly contributed to this by enabling us to take trillions of raw event telemetries and turn these into actionable insight so we can address issues before they start to impact the client. 

DQ: How has the standardization of monitoring tools and strategy helped improve collaboration and communication between different teams and departments? 

Bridget E Engle: Because we have standardized on a specific set of monitoring tools, all of our operators are trained on the same tools. This means that when operators get on a call to triage an issue, they are speaking the same language, which has increased operational efficiency.

DQ: How does your organization ensure that the CTOC stays up to date with the latest cyber threats and security trends?   

Bridget E Engle: We are constantly evaluating how we might be targeted, who those actor groups are and what can we do to make it more difficult for a threat actor to be successful. We have highly effective cyber threat simulation and awareness programs that collectively ensure an intelligence-led approach to testing and training our staff to work through cyber events, as well as proactively identify potential phishing attacks. We also have a strong intelligence team that works directly with governments to ensure an up-to-date awareness of threat actor tactics, techniques and procedures and how they could be employed against organizations similar to BNY Mellon.

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